How
could this be? The first movie nude scene occurred
10 years before movies were "invented."

If you
are an old fart like me, you realize how time has a
way of singling out bits and pieces of history in
the process of compiling the popular version,
leaving other fragments, sometimes the most
important ones, on history's equivalent of the
cutting room floor. Many factors contribute to this.
Some people's roles in history are minimized because
of political incorrectness (Werner von Braun, e.g.),
others are elevated or reduced because of their own
national origin and the national origin of the
storyteller, still others are promoted or demoted by
the official version sponsored by corporate America.

The
history of motion pictures is no exception to the
rule. Various historical icons like Thomas Edison
and the Lumiere brothers have been promoted to
inventor status for various reasons. The British,
rejecting the French and American choices, have
their own champion, a man named William
Friese-Greene, who "was the first man ever to
witness moving pictures on a screen," according to
some sources. He was not. He was not even close.
Friese-Greene beat Edison and the Lumieres, but was
about a decade behind the real champion. The real
"inventor" of movies was actually a crazy British
expatriate who proved to be too politically
incorrect for the history books. He not only
"invented" movies, but movie nude scenes as well. In
fact, he was actually filming naked women more than
a decade before Edison or the Lumieres had ever
successfully completed their own systems.

Let's
begin with a definition.

What is
a movie? For the sake of our analysis here, it is
"projected motion photography." This definition
eliminates the peep show, which was clearly a
predecessor to movies, but not an actual movie.

The
inventor of projected motion pictures was named
Eadweard Muybridge and, by the standards of
inventors at least, he was light-years ahead of the
rest of the world. On May 4, 1880, Muybridge
projected animal motion scenes for several objective
spectators in San Francisco. Everyone in that room
saw projected moving pictures nine years before
Friese-Greene became "the first man ever to witness"
them! Although no mention of Muybridge's
demonstration - really the first movie - is included
in some current published chronologies of the
medium, the event was reported in great detail at
the time. Three San Francisco newspapers reported
the event the next day, and a California weekly
reported it in their May 8 edition.

The San
Francisco Alta reviewed the exhibition in great
detail, and wrote: "Mr. Muybridge has laid the
foundation of a new method of entertaining the
people, and we predict that his instantaneous
photographic magic-lantern zoetrope will make the
rounds of the civilized world." That turned out to
be the first, and possibly still the most accurate,
movie review ever written.

By
1884, Muybridge was engaged in scientific research
of motion photography at the University of
Pennsylvania. His notebooks have been preserved in
great detail at the George Eastman House in
Rochester, N.Y. Here are some entries from
1885:

No. 406: two models
pouring bucket of water over one

No. 977:
relinquishing drapery for nature's garb

I'm not
sure which one was filmed first, but to the left are
four of his compositions from the 1884-1886 period.
One of those may be the first nude scene ever
filmed. The tri-colored one is probably the first
example of a single scene filmed from multiple
angles with several cameras.

That
was in 1885, mind you. Muybridge was filming nude
scenes 10 years before the Lumieres were filming
anything! The Lumieres held their first public
exhibition in December of 1895, and they can
probably be credited with the first known instance
of a filmed fictional story. The previous efforts
had been scientific documentations of motion, often
in controlled studios with pure black or white
backgrounds marked by height grids, like a police
line-up. The Lumieres exhibited something called
"Watering the Gardener," which was a little staged
comedy.

As for
Edison, he didn't even master peep shows until a
decade after Muybridge had demonstrated projection!
Lacking any projection technique of their own,
Edison's corporate people
convinced Thomas Armat, a Washingtonian who had
successfully developed a projector, to allow the
Edison Company to market his product as Edison's
own work. They argued quite persuasively that
their marketing muscle and Edison's reputation
would ensure commercial success for the product
and make everyone more money in the long run.
Armat agreed to the deal, and an Edison employee
named W.K.L Dickson adapted Armat's Phantoscope
projector, renaming it The Edison Vitascope.Hailed as the latest miracle
from the Wizard of Menlo Park, the Vitascope's
highly publicized debut occurred at Koster &
Bials Music Hall in New York on April 23, 1896. It
was promoted as a revolutionary exhibition,
despite the fact that Muybridge had devoted an
entire hall to film projection at the Chicago
World's Fair in 1893!!

What happened to Muybridge's place in
history? A lot. the French didn't want an insane
Englishman to have invented movies. The Americans
wanted their man. The Edison Company wanted their
own version to become the official history, because
that was most profitable version for them. The
British rejected a tainted expatriate in favor of a
safer, more English candidate, albeit one with an
inferior claim. Nobody wanted to give the
credit to a confessed murderer who collected
images of naked prostitutes. Everybody
just wanted Muybridge to go away. And so he did, at
least until quite recently, when his accomplishments
were rediscovered and re-evaluated.

"Insane?" you think, "Murderer? Isn't that
melodramatic?"

He
admitted to the latter, and his own lawyers claimed
the former.

Several years before his 1880 exhibition,
Muybridge stalked and killed his wife's lover at
point blank range with dozens of witnesses. He was
jailed for three months before his trial for first
degree murder. He acknowledged premeditation during
his testimony. His lawyers used a two-edged defense:
(1) they used the legal argument that he was not
guilty by reason of insanity; (2) they snuck in the
utterly extra-legal sympathy argument that killing
one's wife's lover was a justifiable act. The jury
rejected the insanity argument, but Muybridge was
acquitted anyway - despite having no legitimate
legal defense after the insanity argument fell
apart. He owed his freedom to the unpredictability
of the American jury system in the 19th century
West.